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The Role of Women in Hopedale, a Nineteenth-Century Universalist-Unitarian Utopian Community in South-Central Massachusetts

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The Role of Women in Hopedale, a Nineteenth-Century Universalist-Unitarian Utopian Community in South-Central Massachusetts American Communal Societies Quarterly Volume 7 Number 3 Pages 115-137 July 2013 The Role of Women in Hopedale, a Nineteenth-Century Universalist-Unitarian Utopian Community in South-Central Massachusetts Deirdre Corcoran Stam Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.hamilton.edu/acsq Part of the American Studies Commons This work is made available by Hamilton College for educational and research purposes under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. For more information, visit http://digitalcommons.hamilton.edu/about.html or contact [email protected]. The Role of Women in Hopedale, a Nineteenth-Century Universalist-Unitarian Utopian Community in South-Central Massachusetts Cover Page Footnote This paper was first presented at the 2012 Communal Studies Association meeting in Oneida, N.Y. Photographs courtesy of the Bancroft Memorial Library, Hopedale, with special thanks to Ann Fields and Dan Malloy. This articles and features is available in American Communal Societies Quarterly: https://digitalcommons.hamilton.edu/acsq/vol7/iss3/5 Stam: The Role of Women in Hopedale The Role of Women in Hopedale, a Nineteenth- Century Universalist-Unitarian Utopian Community in South-Central Massachusetts By Deirdre Corcoran Stam Abstract In the communal Massachusetts society known as Hopedale, existing formally from 1841 to 1856, women were granted an extraordinary range of rights comparable to those enjoyed by men, including holding office, owning property, and enjoying civil protection even within marriage. Women played a major role in civic engagement and intellectual life. The progressive role for women’s rights took place among a group of people who, unlike inhabitants of contemporary Fruitlands and Brook Farm utopian experiments, were described by Hopedale Community head Adin Ballou as “poor, and comparatively unlearned.”1 Vestiges of community values were perceptible a century later long after the original Hopedale Community had morphed into a paternalistic village whose economy until about 1960 was centered upon the Draper Corporation, successful manufacturer of textile looms, an enterprise that ended with the collapse of the northern textile industry. _____ It is often said that every research endeavor, regardless of its claims of objectivity, is to some degree autobiographical. This one is frankly so. My teenage years were spent in Hopedale, Massachusetts, where vestiges and values of the historical community were still in evidence a century after the flourishing of that mid-nineteenth-century social experiment. In looking today at the role of women in that historical community, I am irresistibly searching for an understanding of my own coming-of-age experience more than a century later. Much of this inquiry centers on the long-terms effects in latter-day Hopedale, and beyond, of Adin Ballou’s reforms of family life, and most particularly of the role of women, in this socialist settlement ————————————————— This paper was first presented at the 2012 Communal Studies Association meeting in Oneida, N.Y. Photographs courtesy of the Bancroft Memorial Library, Hopedale, with special thanks to Ann Fields and Dan Malloy. 115 Published by Hamilton Digital Commons, 2013 1 American Communal Societies Quarterly, Vol. 7, No. 3 [2013] in the Blackstone Valley near the Rhode Island border. To understand women’s roles in Ballou’s Hopedale it is necessary, of course, to consider the roles of both genders. The very concept of role involves social relationships. It is also necessary to describe the setting in which this progressive experimentation took place, the Hopedale Community. Although well known in the social, religious, and political spheres of its day, the 1840s and 1850s, it is largely unknown today even among communitarian historians. Why that should be so is a question we will reconsider in closing remarks. At this point, we need to paint a picture of the settlement in its heyday. After two years of planning for the optimistically numbered “Fraternal Community, No. 1,” in 1841 founder Adin Ballou (1803-1890) and confederates formally founded “Hope Dale,” a name later contracted Fig. 1. The Old House, first home of the Community beginning in 1842. Built ca. 1700, razed in 1874. 116 https://digitalcommons.hamilton.edu/acsq/vol7/iss3/5 2 Stam: The Role of Women in Hopedale to “Hopedale.” In that year, Community members bought the 258-acre “Jones Farm” near the Mill River in Milford. Their plan was to share this dwelling and the first family to settle into the “Old House” in 1841 were the Lillies whose daughter was born only weeks after the move. Five other families soon crowded into the modest and somewhat dilapidated “Old House” which sheltered twenty-eight people (thirteen men and twelve women) by April 1, 1842. “Boarded as one general family,” each nuclear family had one private room, primarily for sleeping, and access to shared communal spaces. By 1846, the Community had grown to seventy people. By 1851, the Community owned about five hundred acres, thirty dwellings, a few mechanics’ shops, a church used also for education, and a few barns and outbuildings.2 Small, privately owned businesses dotted the landscape. At its peak, there were two hundred Community members, all living in Hopedale proper since the anticipated satellite settlements never materialized. By 1855, just before the collapse, the population inhabited forty-one “pretty dwellings,” according to the Woonsocket Patriot, including three octagons, and conducted sixteen community businesses.3 In its unified, utopian form, the Community lasted for fourteen years, dissolving formally in 1856 with the transformation of its economic base from a joint participatory stock company (regarded by Ballou as socialist but never communist), where each was credited according to his contribution upon entering the community and subsequently to his or her contributed labor. After the formal end of the community, the enterprises became a privately owned company held by erstwhile Community members and major stockholders Ebenezer and George Draper. Elements of the original contract remained in place until 1868 when the Community morphed into the Hopedale Parish, a religious congregation led by Adin Ballou, at this time a Unitarian minister. After the breakup, the town prospered as a loom-making industry, thanks largely to the success of the Northrup loom, under Draper leadership until the later 1950s. At that time, a combination of decline in northern cloth manufacturing and related union issues brought to an end the unified and paternalistic nature of the town under Draper stewardship. The solid, attractive Draper-owned housing was then sold to residents and a trickle of outsiders entered the community. It was shortly before the final breakup of the Draper Corporation that my own Hopedale experience took place. Although the prosperity of the town began to decline in those and later years, the essential social values remained in place, clearly derived 117 Published by Hamilton Digital Commons, 2013 3 American Communal Societies Quarterly, Vol. 7, No. 3 [2013] from the founding principles of the Hopedale Community. It was a decent and comfortable place in which to grow up but somewhat confusing to a young person whose early years were spent in a more heterogeneous and competitive milieu. The basic principles of the Hopedale Community as described by Adin Ballou in 1851 were these.4 We begin with what the Community was for: a belief in Jesus Christ and his teachings; peace and harmony; a democratic and socialist republic where neither caste, color, sex, nor age is proscribed; mutual criticism and public remonstrance; chastity; full sharing of liberty, equality, and fraternity; sharing of goods and gifts to benefit both possessors and the needy; equal and excellent education for all; and constant striving toward improvement. Just as important was what the Community was against. The list, drawn loosely from Ballou’s prose, is a little complex because of the prevalence in Community documents of double negatives, both grammatically and conceptually. In essence, the Community forbad and/or discouraged these actions: outlawing specific theological dogmas, ordinances or ceremonies; ill behavior or feeling to friend or foe; swearing; intoxicating beverages; taking oaths; slave holding and pro-slavery compromises; war and preparations for war; violence against government, society, family or individuals; and interference from the outside government (although it was recognized that taxes to the state must be paid). Rights were extended to all adults, men and women. These rights included: worship according to dictates of conscience (although women did not function as preachers), free inquiry and free speech, holding elected office, assuming a chosen vocation, owning property and assets, forming friendships with kindred minds, contracting marriage and sustaining family relationships, joining or leaving the Hopedale Association, and the right to “seek happiness in all rightful ways and by all innocent means.”5 These were the foundational beliefs of the Community, and their extension to women marked Hopedale as markedly different from most other intentional communities of its time. These basic rights were in place in the Hopedale that I knew first- hand with one significant exception, and that was a single but significant limitation on free inquiry. The dominant ethos in town was Unitarian, reflecting the last days of the early Community and the ongoing religious preference of the dominant Draper family. By the twentieth century, the Draper Corporation, in effect, owned the town (with very little exception) 118 https://digitalcommons.hamilton.edu/acsq/vol7/iss3/5 4 Stam: The Role of Women in Hopedale and therefore, in a sense, operated and controlled its schools. It would not be overstating the case to say that Unitarian values permeated the system. While technically public, the largely Draper-financed school system functioned like a private educational enterprise with a high degree of control assumed, and a considerable degree of uniformity of outlook among students and teachers. It was assumed that most students would ultimately become part of the Draper workforce.
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